Blog Post | “We Don’t Post Anything Without Approvals.” Why Ministries of Foreign Affairs So Often Fail at Social Media
“The first thing to know is…we don’t post anything without approvals,” the lead social media manager at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) explained after I asked about the MFA’s social media processes. [1]
We were seated in a ground-floor room at the back of 37 Quai d’Orsay, the ornate building that has housed the French MFA since the mid-19th century. As she described the lengthy approvals process, I soon understood that the real messaging decisions were taking place in the plush office floors above us. Yet even the French Foreign Ministry cannot change the basic reality that what resonates on social media is rarely over-sanitized diplomatic press releases. Over a decade of research shows the factors most likely to build a following—authenticity, a willingness to make mistakes, a conversational tone, and timely response—are fundamentally mismatched with traditional approaches to diplomatic communication. [2] As former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted in a 2024 Wired magazine interview: “ ‘Move fast and break things’ is literally the exact opposite of what we try to do at the State Department.” [3]
Since the rise of social media in the early 2010s, MFAs around the world have been stuck in this paradox. MFAs have routinely declared their ambitions: the State Department boasts over 1,300 social media accounts and has been pursuing a “digital-first” public diplomacy since at least 2014. [4] The French MFA’s 2021 Digital Transformation Plan placed social media at the center of France’s diplomatie d’influence (influence diplomacy). [5] But despite these public commitments to social media, MFAs’ online public diplomacy remains captive to the same hierarchical approval culture that has defined diplomatic communication for centuries.
What explains the persistence of these rigid approval cultures, even when they clearly contradict a successful social media strategy? The answer, I argue, is organizational insecurity. Organizational insecurity is the persistent fear of marginalization or irrelevance, especially in relation to more powerful government institutions. It is a shared perception that the institution’s relevance is declining, which becomes embedded in its culture and procedures.
Organizational insecurity surfaced countless times across over 40 interviews I conducted with senior diplomats and social media managers at the French MFA and the U.S. State Department from 2023 to 2025. At the junior level, social media managers are rewarded for repeating the official line and avoiding all risks. This means reposting content from political or MFA leadership, with occasional generic posts of national flags or holiday greetings. One essential rule drives their actions: never post anything without ensuring every senior diplomat who might be interested has approved it.
Beyond social media managers, organizational insecurity also shapes the entire MFA hierarchy. To appear modern and technologically adept, the MFA must maintain an active social media presence, all while not attracting any negative attention from political leadership. The result is that the approval architecture created over generations for press releases on sensitive political topics is imported as is to social media. In other words, the process of drafting a social media post remains roughly the same as that of drafting TV talking points in the 1960s.
Ostensibly, MFAs use social media for public diplomacy—the practice of engaging foreign publics to build influence and understanding. And yet instead of a digital public diplomacy strategy aimed at foreign publics, the daily practices of social media managers show something else. In my interviews with French and U.S. social media managers, three distinct scripts consistently emerged: the office assistant, the image custodian, and the cultural translator. Each script offers a different answer to the question of who these digital practices are really for.
The office assistant script, by far the most common, treats social media as routine box-checking. When enacting this script, social media managers simply repost what the national leader or Foreign Minister has already posted, ignoring foreign publics entirely. The image custodian script allows for more flexibility, as social media managers can draft original content to advance a specific, preferred narrative. As image custodians, their goal is to explain and persuade; in this script, foreign publics are audiences to be managed. The cultural translator is the rarest of the three scripts. Here, social media managers are empowered to transcend organizational insecurity and create authentic two-way communication with foreign publics. The cultural translator script only emerges when a given embassy has substantial autonomy, either because it is viewed as peripheral, or in the U.S. case, if the ambassador happens to have close ties to the White House. The cultural translator is the only script that engages with foreign publics for its own sake, often by leveraging digitally native formats. Common examples include unscripted interviews with local artists or short-form videos of diplomats and residents sharing street food.
In two years of interviews with diplomats and social media managers across French and U.S. diplomatic networks, I encountered the cultural translator script only a few times. At the French embassy in Burkina Faso (2022-2024) and the U.S. Embassy in Algeria (2020-2023), a confluence of factors including less scrutiny from headquarters, ambassadors willing to empower social media managers, and social-media savvy hires allowed both embassy accounts to build influential local followings. [6] Unfortunately, these successes were short-lived. In Burkina Faso, a military coup installed a new government far more hostile to France, forcing much of the embassy staff to leave the country. In Algeria, the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war eroded the goodwill the embassy had carefully cultivated, and leadership significantly pulled back its social media presence.
These examples show that organizational insecurity can be overcome, but only when embassy leadership creates the conditions to do so. Ultimately, MFAs will need to decide how much they want to invest in their relationship with foreign publics. If genuine connection is a goal, they must foster environments where diplomats and social media managers can transcend organizational insecurity. Social media managers will need room to take risks, post quickly, and treat social media as its own medium with its own rules, rather than as a digital press release.
Rémi Meehan is an Associate Doctor at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris, where he recently defended his dissertation, “We don’t post anything without approvals”: How organizational insecurity impedes French and U.S. public diplomacy on social media. His research examines how Ministries of Foreign Affairs grapple with the disruptive shifts social media has introduced to political and social communication, specifically focusing on the bureaucratic barriers to creating effective social media content.
Before entering academia, Rémi spent 12 years at Morgan Stanley as a bond trader and geopolitical risk manager covering developed and emerging markets. His tenure in the private sector piqued his interest in the narratives states project to international publics, especially on social media. Rémi holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po, an MSc in International Strategy and Diplomacy from the London School of Economics, and an A.B. in International and Public Affairs from Princeton University. He is a member of the Public Diplomacy Council of America.
[1] Anonymous French social media manager, in-person interview by the author, Quai d'Orsay, Paris, France, March 4, 2024.
[2] Vilma Luoma-aho, Tuisku Pirttimäki, Devdeep Maity, Juha Munnukka, and Hanna Reinikainen. 2019. “Primed Authenticity: How Priming Impacts Authenticity Perception of Social Media Influencers.” International Journal of Strategic Communication 13 (4): 352–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2019.1617716; Valeria Penttinen, “Perfect Imperfection: Vulnerability in Influencer Communications on Social Media,” Journal of Marketing Management 41, no. 5-6 (April 2025): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2025.2495330; Tom Kelleher and Barbara M. Miller, “Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 11, no. 2 (January 2006): 395–414, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00019.x.; Jennifer L. Dapko, Stefanie Boyer, and Eric Harris, “The Importance of Timely Social Media Responsiveness,” Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing 8, no. 4 (Spring 2021): 358–64; Anonymous former executive at Meta (formerly Facebook), videoconference interview by the author, San Francisco, California, April 23, 2024.
[3] Garrett Graff, “Antony Blinken Dragged US Diplomacy Into the 21st Century. Even He’s Surprised by the Results,” Wired, September 4, 2024, https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-antony-blinken/.
[4] U.S. Department of State. “Global Social Media Presence.” https://www.state.gov/social/; United States Department of State, “2014 Comprehensive Annual Report on Public Diplomacy and International Broadcasting,” United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, 2014, 15-16, https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/235159.pdf.
[5] France Diplomatie, “Plan de Transformation Numérique” (Ministère de l’Europe des Affaires Étrangères, 2021), https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/2021_plan_transfo_num_cle45ad26.pdf.
[6] Anonymous French social media manager, phone interview by the author, Cotonou, Benin, December 6, 2024; Anonymous former locally employed staff member at a U.S. Embassy, videoconference interview by the author, Washington, D.C., May 3, 2024.